Delivery of video services, such as broadcast video and streaming, often involves first compressing the video for delivery using one of the widely known video compression standards, such as MPEG-2, AVC or HEVC. Video compressed to these standards will be decodable and playable on a variety of devices, such as professional decoders, tablets and handheld devices. Service providers for video delivery often have the option of compressing video to desired bit rates. Lower bit rates result in more compression, and since video compression is a lossy operation, the lower the bit rate, the lower the perceived video quality. There exists a need to be able to monitor and measure the video quality of compressed video.
Video quality measurements face challenges in accuracy due to the non-deterministic nature in which the human visual system processes information. Prior video quality metric performance has evolved though the use of metric databases (such as the University of Texas LIVE database and the Video Quality Experts Group 2000 database, among others). These databases may provide a direct correlation measurement between a video quality metric and mean opinion scores of viewers of the same video.
Prior video quality metrics are typically full-reference metrics. In other words, the metrics require the original unmolested source video to calculate a value for the metric. Such approaches may be cumbersome to employ, particularly when the measurements are required for a set of video channels as opposed to a single video channel.